With the national spotlight on The Keystone State’s April 22 Primary, many heads remain buried in sand when it comes to electronic voting.

In March 2004, Governor Ed Rendell announced a new tourism slogan for Pennsylvania: “The State of Independence”. But with Pennsylvania officials continuing along in what seems to be mindless oblivion to the dangers of paperless electronic voting machines, perhaps Pennsylvania’s slogan should be “The State of Denial” when it comes to elections.

Following the inconclusive Ohio and Texas Democratic primaries earlier this month, the national spotlight turned swiftly to Pennsylvania’s April 22 election as the next battleground. And in the glare of that white-hot national spotlight it is more apparent than ever that there is great risk for electoral disaster in The Keystone State.

With fifty-one of its most populous counties still voting on completely paperless Direct Record Electronic machines, Pennsylvania remains one of the last twelve states to have passed no law requiring every vote to be backed up with a voter-verified paper record or ballot.

Time and time again Pennsylvania has had to replace failed electronic voting machines, bailing out counties and vendors at taxpayer expense. Pennsylvania has been plagued with a rash of problems caused by failures of paperless, unverifiable voting machines. These problems ranged from extremely high levels of undervotes (indicating a large number of voters are not having their votes counted), to faulty programming and ballot preparation, to outright loss of votes due to machines being set up improperly on Election Day.

With huge party machine politics entrenched on both the Republican and
Democratic sides, Pennsylvania had a long history of election
irregularities and difficulties long before the rise of electronic
voting. And although one of the state’s most prominent suppliers of
voting machines and supplies was convicted of election fraud, the
paperless electronic voting machines his company originally developed
continue to count the votes of nearly two and a half million
Pennsylvanians to this very day.

But despite past problems and current warnings from computer scientists
and neighboring states, Pennsylvania officials from County
Commissioners and Election Directors to the Governor himself
inexplicably continue to embrace paperless electronic voting. Their
public mantra is that Pennsylvania elections on paperless electronic
machines are secure and accurate.

How did The Keystone State become The State of Denial? To understand better, one first needs to look at Pennsylvania itself.

Physically located at the junction of our Northeast, Midwest, and
Southern regions, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania embodies many
cultures and ideologies. The electorate is made up of diverse
populations including high-tech and well educated professionals,
old-time second and third generation immigrant working classes that
formerly worked in the state’s mines and mills, farmers and other rural
citizens (agriculture is Pennsylvania’s #1 industry), and new immigrant
communities. While traditionally moderate-to-liberal major cities
dominate the southwest and southeast corners of the state, conservative
politics have long been the tradition in the northern and central
regions. This "red" area of the state, known as "The T" due to its T
shape on a map, is what sparked James Carville's famous description of
Pennsylvania as "Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in the
middle".

Pennsylvania has over 8 million registered voters as of November 2007.
The state is almost evenly divided politically, with 3,883,378
Democratic voters and 3,245,271 Republicans, while 984,349 voters
remain non-partisan or are members of other political parties.

With very close political registration numbers like this, and the
long-standing balance and tensions between The Cities and The T,
Pennsylvania is known as one of the most swinging of the swing states
when it comes to voting. For decades Keystone State voters have flipped
the Governorship back and forth between the two major parties like
clockwork every 8 years. With Ed Rendell the current (Democratic)
Governor, Pennsylvania’s full-time General Assembly now contains a
Republican majority in its Senate and a one-vote Democratic majority in
the House, which due to a rather unprecedented compromise is led by a
Republican Speaker.

And that same Pennsylvania General Assembly is famous for moving at a
glacial pace when it comes to reforms, displaying what sometimes seems
to be a particular aversion to updating and modernizing the state
Election Code. One Pennsylvania law on the books right now requires all
polling places to have a lantern in place to illuminate voting machines.

But in yet another peculiar twist, Pennsylvania was one of the early
adopters of electronic voting. The Secretary of the Commonwealth first
certified the Shouptronic 1242 Direct Record Electronic machines for
use in Pennsylvania on July 3, 1984.

As far back as the 1990s there were problems recorded with electronic
machines when the MicroVote system was removed from Montgomery County
due to machines shutting down randomly and losing votes.

Despite this difficulty in the state’s third largest voting
jurisdiction, as the 21st Century dawned a number of Pennsylvania
counties were moving voluntarily to purchase touchscreen and pushbutton
electronic voting equipment. And as more counties adopted electronic
voting, the ranks of counties dealing with problems grew. Some
incidents resulted in serious losses of votes.

During the election of 2004, it is estimated that at least ten thousand
votes were lost by the UniLect Patriot touchscreen voting system in
Beaver, Mercer, and Greene counties. Some precincts in Mercer County
had undervote rates of over seventy and eighty percent. If this were
true it would mean that, in the incredibly important Presidential
election, eight out of ten voters in those precincts simply did not
care to vote for President! The far more probable scenario is that the
UniLect machine failed to count most of those votes. With no voter
verified paper record available on those machines to recount or audit,
there was simply no way to reclaim those lost votes or even to know for
sure exactly what happened.

In April 2005, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Pedro Cortès finally
decertified the UniLect Patriot voting machine for use in Pennsylvania
elections after it failed to count votes correctly during the
re-examination petitioned by citizens in Beaver, Mercer, and Greene
counties.

Following the decertification of the its machine, the UniLect company
asked the PA Department of State for a second re-examination. At this
hearing, held in May 2005, the Patriot system failed even more
spectacularly. The President of the UniLect company was unable to get
his machine to record votes properly during the hearing. The result was
that this system was decertified for use in Pennsylvania for the second
time.

Eventually the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was forced to reimburse the
three strapped UniLect counties so they could obtain alternative voting
systems, effectively bailing out this vendor that provided an inferior
product.

Nonetheless, statewide media paid little attention to the problem or to
the expenditure. The affected counties quietly moved temporarily to a
fallback paper-based optical scan system that was widely derided as
old-fashioned and problematic by election directors still enamored with
the deceptive ease of touch screens.

On May 17, 2005, a number of Danaher (formerly Shouptronic) DREs failed
to record any votes in about half a dozen Berks County precincts during
the Municipal Primary. Votes were apparently not recorded due to
improper settings on the machine during the election, and improper
memory cartridges being installed. With no paper records to audit or
recount, a re-vote was called for, lawsuits were filed, and some voters
never did get to cast a vote that was counted in that Primary.

Once again, if noticed at all, the loss of votes was dismissed by
officials and media as a simple "glitch" or blamed on pollworker error.

With the Help America Vote Act taking effect for the first federal
election of 2006, the rush was on to comply and get the federal money
HAVA promised for the purchase of new machines. It seemed that no one
in a position of authority wanted to buck the system by pointing out
the electronic voting was an emperor without clothes.

The stage was set for a free-for-all as vendors readied themselves to
vie for the windfall in voting machine sales, and denial became the
order of the day in Pennsylvania.

(NEXT: Vendors, VVPATS, and more from Pennsylvania, the State of Denial.)